Legumes vs. labour rights: how Indian women pay for the cost of dal

A cooking project in Asia’s biggest informal
settlement brings into focus the millions of workers denied a share in the
world’s seventh-largest economy.

In November 2015, the Indian national
press was agog over the criminal price of dal (lentils). The government’s 5.5
per cent inflation rate somehow didn’t square with the 105 per cent spike in
the store price of three staple dals, on top of an already prohibitive price
tag slapped on in previous years. December came. Nothing changed. Paying a
king’s ransom for dal became the status quo for families habituated to shelling
out 60-70 per cent of their monthly incomes on basic food.

In the media, the events unraveled in
the language of a detective story. Certain news agencies claimed to have
uncovered a shocking network of fraudulent Indian importers, kickbacks
implicating officials at shipping companies, and unlawful hoarding, which
collectively came to be known as ‘the dal scam’. Corollaries in the cost of
restaurant food regularly surfaced in news reports and in everyday
conversation. Yet no one seemed to wonder what the rising cost of food was
doing to one underclass of worker - ordinary Indian housewives.

Recounting the dal scam, I am reminded
of laments by housewife Rizwana Qureishi during a project I conducted in Mumbai
in 2014. The Dharavi Food Project, developed in what is known as Asia’s largest
informal settlement, set out to study home-cooking as an integration of food,
art and women’s labour. The collaboration involved dozens of housewives from
low-income backgrounds, of which eight finally participated in staged cooking
sessions over thirteen weeks. Discussion, debate and archiving recipes were integral
to each meeting and the operation evolved into a mixed-genre book about food,
aesthetics and women’s labour. Rizwana, one of its protagonists, often remarked
on how the high price of basic foods meant continual cost-cutting in the
kitchen. Making every last thing from scratch enabled her to continue cooking
reasonably good meals, despite a shrinking budget, and on average, kitchen work
consumed two thirds of her day. Were it up to her, Rizwana would spend that
time cooking for pay in other people’s houses. At home, she was drudge - loved,
but overworked. Outside, her talents were bound to accrue a more useful kind of
love: pay.

In August 2015, The Hindu
reported on six women in the village of Peepli Khera (60km from New Delhi) who
defied the village council to work in nearby factories. Concurrently, The
New York Times carried a statistically-oriented think piece co-written by a
Harvard public policy professor and a Harvard bureaucrat. Titled, “Why aren’t
India’s women working?” it listed reasons that an ensuing NYT report
chronicled through the colourful lives of those seven notorious women in Peepli
Khera. Building on The Hindu’s story, the NYT gave a blow-by-blow
account of female determination and the hunger for work pitted against male
domination. The women’s physical hardships and struggle to adhere to caste
strictures around contact inevitably read as a metaphor for the Indian social
landscape.

Across swathes of the country,
patriarchal sanction denies women public contact with men, and within conservative
Hindu communities, with castes other than their own. A paying job invariably
entails one or both. Consider the bane of being female in India. Gender-defined
imperatives meanwhile oblige women to cook, clean, and look after children, and
the old—what social sciences term unpaid ‘care work’. Women are required to
collect food and fuel, and fetch water (due to poor infrastructure), work in
family businesses, and should they live in rural settings, cattle-graze,
winnow, and work in the fields—that is, to perform unpaid work. Being stuck in
such dead-end jobs, deemed low-skill and low value, with no prospect of upward
mobility or promotion, seems to confirm women’s presumed non-productivity.
Working in factories and earning a salary obviously upends the algorithm in
every way, and not just by showing that women have a right to paid work.

Since the late 1990s, left-leaning
economists Jayati Ghosh and Indira Hirway and social scientist Nandita Ghosh
have contended that the consummation of women’s right to work, a
constitutionally-protected right, is intertwined with rethinking unpaid work.
Ideally, women should not have to fight to take up jobs. Yet nor should women
working without pay be written out of economic narratives. For women’s care
work to count as real work, it must first become economically visible.
Measuring it as GDP would integrate it into the System of National Accounts
(currently blind to care work) and bind it with productive economy. The latest
reports by McKinsey indicate that Indian women perform ten times as much unpaid
work as men, accounting for up to 39 per cent of India’s GDP. Tacking that onto
the 20 per cent women currently contribute to the GDP would instantly reveal
how little men in India actually work: 41 per cent of the GDP.

Cut to Bombay (now Mumbai) 1972, where
a prolonged women’s protest against food inflation pre-emptively vindicated the
feminist labour theory of value set forth by Ghosh, Hirway, and Gandhi. Jointly organised by leaders of communist and socialist
parties, the ‘Anti Price Rise Movement’ (APRM) for three years prior to Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian rule galvanised almost 20,000 women in
street protests against the cost of food essentials, including grains, cooking
oil, sugar, and kerosene. The movement’s historic call to action has in itself
been cast by some commentators as a human rights manifesto. Where domestic work
is already disproportionately performed by women, food and fuel inflation force
them to opt for relatively cheap home-produced goods and services and further
tax their time, leaving little for rest or to acquire human capital - education
or skills - that would prepare them for jobs in the paying labor market. In
short, food inflation compromises their right to work.

It is over forty years since the APRM
ended. Many of the same patterns created by food inflation persist today, yet
little like the APRM seems possible. As Gandhi warned in 1994, viewing the
right to work in isolation ends up skewing gender equity as something that
applies purely to women. It obscures that men’s shunning of domestic
responsibility has created a sexual division of labour that “haunts women in
the labour market”. Today, the thin trickle-down of India’s selectively-booming
economy has spawned a flimsy but functional delusion, whereby people with
access to utilitarian or good-quality education, well-paying jobs, and liberal
forms of sociality seem to believe that Indian women have opportunities by the
dozen.

My work in the Dharavi Food Project
showed otherwise. Right from our first meeting, participant Kavita Kawalkar
expressed the desire to become a teacher. Yet a year later, she confessed that
study time for a teaching diploma was eating into her care work at home.
Couldn’t her husband help out? She looked at me, dumfounded. No, he would not.
So instead, she had opted for a part-time clerical job requiring no extra
training. Then there was Sarita Rai, a mother of three from a small village in
north India who had moved to Dharavi to be with her husband, a peon in a
courier’s office. The needs of Sarita’s children and extended family take up
most of her time, but in the afternoon, she spends an hour or two on piece-rate
work, attaching sequins to tunics. How many does she complete in a day? Rs. 50
(50 pence) worth. Would she like to make more? Of course, she would. Except
care work comes first. By the time the workshops ended, Sarita had gone from
handsome and healthy to thin and wan. The physical strain of caring for a large
family had so debilitated her hands she could no longer sew. The lost allowance
was her bitterest regret.

But the most prescient remarks came
from Kavita Vishwakarma. In September 2014, on the workshop’s last day, she
offered a common Hindi proverb to describe why the Dharavi Food Project struck
a chord with her: “You know what they say, ‘homemade chicken gravy is just like
ordinary dal.’” The proverb’s literal meaning is that homemade dal is a basic
food while homemade chicken is not. Since chicken costs more (or did before the
dal scam), dal is naturally valued less than chicken. And here begins the
proverb’s implication: Women are like chicken: special. But at home they’re as
good as ordinary dal. They mean nothing. They are nothing. Kavita was making a
point about how the workshops had framed her cooking - her unpaid work - as art
and productivity. Her recipes had been archived. Her story was recorded. She
was going to appear in a book that would be sold. The pieces were beginning to
fall into place. Cooking was real, gainful work, and she was a worker as
productive as they come.

Two
decades after the struggle to re-evaluate the gainful participation of women in
India’s economy began in 1977, a path-breaking survey was conducted by India’s Central Statistics Office (CSO) to
study how men and women spent their time. Its staggering discoveries did not
graduate into policies integrating unpaid women’s labour into national
accounting. But last year, the CSO announced its intention to roll out a
comprehensive all-India time-use survey to address gender imbalance. It will be
two more years before the survey launches. Until then, millions of Indian women
continue to be obscured as non-workers. But not the women of Peepli Khera,
whose fight, much more than securing their right to work, must be understood as
a boycott of invisibility.

About the author

Prajna Desai is a graduate of Yale University. She
works as a writer and curator in Mumbai. Her book entitled ‘The Indecisive
Chicken: Stories and recipes from eight Dharavi cooks’ (2015) uses the lens of
everyday cooking to study aesthetics and women’s labour. She has previously
published across Frieze, Art in America, Aperture, artforum.com, tcj.com, Caravan-Vantage, guernicamag.com, Biblio, and Open magazine.

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